Title
Moats and Drawbridges: An Isolation Primitive for Reconfigurable Hardware Based Systems
Abstract
Blurring the line between software and hardware, reconfigurable devices strike a balance between the raw high speed of custom silicon and the post-fabrication flexibility of general-purpose processors. While this flexibility is a boon for embedded system developers, who can now rapidly prototype and deploy solutions with performance approaching custom designs, this results in a system development methodology where functionality is stitched together from a variety of "soft IP cores," often provided by multiple vendors with different levels of trust. Unlike traditional software where resources are managed by an operating system, soft IP cores necessarily have very fine grain control over the underlying hardware. To address this problem, the embedded systems community requires novel security primitives which address the realities of modern reconfigurable hardware. We propose an isolation primitive, moats and drawbridges, that are built around four design properties: logical isolation, interconnect traceability, secure reconfigurable broadcast, and configuration scrubbing. Each of these is a fundamental operation with easily understood formal properties, yet maps cleanly and efficiently to a wide variety of reconfigurable devices. We carefully quantify the required overheads on real FPGAs and demonstrate the utility of our methods by applying them to the practical problem of memory protection.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1109/SP.2007.28
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Keywords
Field
DocType
modern reconfigurable hardware,system development methodology,secure reconfigurable broadcast,soft ip core,reconfigurable hardware,custom design,operating system,underlying hardware,custom silicon,isolation primitive,embedded system developer,reconfigurable device,broadcasting,embedded systems,prototypes,security,silicon,field programmable gate arrays,control systems,embedded system,operating systems,hardware,resource management,fpgas
Memory protection,Broadcasting,Computer science,Soft IP,Field-programmable gate array,Software,Software development process,Traceability,Reconfigurable computing,Embedded system
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1081-6011
0-7695-2848-1
37
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.91
30
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ted Huffmire120411.80
Brett Brotherton2975.93
Gang Wang336217.80
Timothy Sherwood41921123.28
Ryan Kastner51779147.73
Timothy Levin616510.38
Thuy Nguyen779542.13
Cynthia Irvine816719.58